Wishful thinking? Stalin had issued some threatening secret circulars, introduced a policy innovation (widened application of the punitive Article 107), and made a personal visit (“beastly pressure”), and voilà—grain for the cities and army would roll in? Intimations of trouble were there: one attendee at the Novosibirsk meeting, Sergei Zagumyonny, the recently appointed head of the Siberian branch of the USSR Agricultural Bank, had the audacity to challenge Stalin’s authority. Zagumyonny’s verbal objections were not the sole dissenting voice that day; the chairman of the Siberian union of consumers’ cooperatives called for skillful agitation, rather than coercion.62 But the next day (January 19), Zagumyonny saw fit to elaborate his objections in writing to Stalin as well as to Syrtsov, arguing that if kulaks were arrested for merely refusing to sell the grain in their storage sheds, the middle and poor peasants would view it as an end to the NEP, which would result in the country having less grain—the opposite result of the intended policy. “I do not want to be a prophet,” Zagyumonny wrote, before prophesizing catastrophe. He even asserted superior knowledge to his superiors, Stalin included: “I know the village well, both from growing up in it and from recent letters from my father, a poor peasant.”63 Stalin took his pencil and underscored several passages or appended mocking comments (“ha ha”) to the letter. Whether he fully grasped that Zagumyonny’s thoughts were shared by others in that room of officials, and beyond, remains unclear, but Stalin decided to address the Siberian party bureau again, for a second time, on January 20, in a narrower circle.
Apologizing for divulging the existence and contents of a private letter from Zagumyonny, who was not invited to this gathering, Stalin stressed that “those proposed measures I spoke about the day before yesterday will strike the kulak, the market cornerer, so that there will be no price gouging. And then the peasant will understand, there’ll be no price rise, it’s necessary to bring grain to market, otherwise you’ll go to prison. . . . Comrade Zagumyonny says that this will lead to a decrease in grain procurement. How is that clear?” Stalin’s understanding of “the market” connoted not supply and demand but the state’s ability to get its hands on peasants’ output. In Ukraine, he stated, “they smashed the speculators in the head and the market got healthy again.”64 He denied that he was abrogating the NEP, but reminded those present that “our country is not a capitalist country, but a socialist country, which, in allowing NEP, at the same time retained the final word for the state, so we are acting correctly.” He added that “argumentation by use of force has the same significance as argumentation by use of economic means, and sometimes greater significance, when the market [grain procurements] has been spoiled and they try to turn our entire economic policy onto the rails of capitalism, which we will not do.” Soon, to reinforce his counterargument to Zagumyonny’s assertions that middle and even poor peasants would side with kulaks who came under assault, Stalin and the Siberian party bureau would stipulate that 25 percent of any kulak grain confiscated in the public trials be redistributed to poor peasants and “economically weak” middle peasants, thereby linking the latter to the party’s grain procurement drive.65 Zagumyonny’s defiance had spurred a sharpening of policy, but it may have accomplished far more. Stalin, who usually played his cards extremely close to his vest, offered a look into his deepest thinking.66
Point blank, Stalin suddenly told the circle of Siberian officials that Soviet agricultural development had dead-ended. He recounted how in the revolution, the gentry class had been expropriated and their large farms subdivided, but mostly into small peasant households that failed to specialize, growing a little bit of everything—grain, sunflowers, keeping cows for milk. “Such a mixed economy, the small household variety, is a misfortune for a large country,” he argued, a problem that was immense in scale, because if before the revolution there had been some 15 million individual peasant proprietors [edinolichniki], now the figure approached 25 million. Most of them did not avail themselves of machines, scientific knowledge, or fertilizer.67 “Whence the strength of the kulak?” Stalin asked. “Not in the fact he was born strong, nothing of the kind, but in the fact that his farming is large scale.” Size was how the kulak could take advantage of machinery and modernize. “Could we develop agriculture in kulak fashion, as individual farms, along the path of large-scale farms and the path of latifundia, as in Hungary, Eastern Prussia, America and so on?” Stalin asked. “No, we could not. We’re a Soviet country, we want to implant a collective economy, not solely in industry, but in agriculture. We need to follow that path.” Moreover, Stalin explained, even if the Soviet regime had wanted to develop along the path of individual-proprietor large-scale kulak farms, that approach would fail because “the whole Soviet system, all our laws, all our financial measures, all measures to supply villages with agricultural equipment, everything here moves in the direction of limiting individual-proprietor large-scale farming.” The Soviet system “cuts the kulak off in every way, which has resulted in the cul-de-sac into which our agriculture has now entered.” To get out of the cul-de-sac, he concluded, “there remains only the path of developing large-scale farms of a collective type.” Precisely collective farms (kolkhozy), not the cooperatives used by small-scale farmers: “Unification of small and tiny peasant household farms into large collective farms . . . for us is the only path.”68
The only path—Stalin was not one to utter idle reflections. Inside the Communist party throughout most of the 1920s, the NEP had been savagely attacked by the Left opposition and then the United opposition. Stalin had defended the NEP against these leftist attacks.69 But these matters had been discussed endlessly not just at the formal party gatherings. Many an evening, as the Stalin faction converged on the Kremlin after work—Stalin, Molotov, Orjonikidze, and others down Ilinka from Old Square, Voroshilov down Znamenka—they gathered at someone’s Kremlin apartment, often Voroshilov’s (the grandest), sometimes Stalin’s, where they would chew the cud about the plateauing harvest and dire imperative to modernize agriculture, the plethora of enemies, the absence of allies, the army’s lack of modern weapons. The hard men of the Stalin faction looked to him to figure out a practical way forward. NEP’s dilemma was not merely that the rate of industrial growth seemed too low, making people wonder how long under the NEP it would take before the USSR became a truly industrial country. The dilemma was not merely the unmodernized technical level and small, divided plots of Soviet agriculture, which produced harvests insufficient to support the kind of grain exports necessary to finance imports of machines, including for agriculture. The dilemma was not even just the fact that the regime lacked control over the food supply or the countryside, rendering it hostage to the actions and decisions of the peasantry. All these were profound problems, but the core dilemma of the NEP was ideological: seven years into the NEP, socialism (non-capitalism) was not in sight. NEP amounted to grudgingly tolerated capitalism in a country that had had an avowedly anticapitalist or socialist revolution.
Exactly when Stalin had concluded that it was now time to force the village onto the path of socialism remains unclear. Kalinin would look back and call a politburo commission on collective farms established in 1927, and headed by Molotov, a “mental revolution.”70 But not long before embarking for Siberia, Stalin had told a Moscow organization party conference (November 23, 1927) that “to pursue a policy of discord with the majority of the peasantry means to start a civil war in the village, make it difficult to supply our industry with peasant raw materials (cotton, sugar beet, flax, leather, wool, etc.), disrupt the supply of agricultural products to the working class, undermine the very foundations of our industry.”71 In Novosibirsk, in effect, Stalin was arguing against himself. His was not a lone voice. Karlis Baumanis, an ethnic Latvian known as Karl Bauman (b. 1892) and a high official in the Moscow party organization, had emphatically stated at the same Moscow party forum (November 27) that “there cannot be two socialisms, one for the countryside and one for the city.”72 Still, this w
as not yet recognized as official policy. True, during the very last minutes of the 15th Party Congress in December 1927, even as the ink was drying on the expulsions from the party of the leftists Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, a resolution on “work in the village” had acquired that revealing amendment about large-scale collective farms being set as the party’s fundamental task in the countryside. The significance of that Stalin-initiated resolution—worded generally, and lacking a timetable—may have escaped the wider party, let alone the country at large. Large-scale collective farms had gone unmentioned in the four alarmist Central Committee circulars on grain procurements that Stalin had dispatched to all local party organizations between December 14 and January 14, the last one on the day before he departed for Siberia.73 Molotov and Stalin had offices that adjoined a common conference room and no one saw or talked more with the general secretary, but Molotov’s long report to the Central Committee (January 25, 1928) concerning his own grain procurement trip to the Urals, and before that to Ukraine, said nothing about forcing wholesale collectivization.74 Out in Siberia, moreover, Stalin’s speech on January 20 had been confined to the narrowest of circles. Even the mere fact of his trip to Siberia was held in secrecy: No mention appeared in any Soviet newspaper.75 Nonetheless, the unpublished Siberian speech was earth-shattering.
Nearly eighteen years before, in August 1910, Pyotr Stolypin, the greatest of all tsarist-era officials, had crisscrossed the Western Siberian steppes, sometimes riding more than 500 miles on horseback away from railheads and rivers to meet with peasants, who turned out to acclaim him.76 Stolypin wrote to his wife, “I have at least seen and learned things that one cannot learn from documents.”77 The tsarist prime minister’s bold reforms—to extirpate what he saw as the roots of peasant unrest by encouraging peasants to quit the communes, consolidate land into contiguous farms, and convert these larger holdings into private property—had sought nothing less than the wholesale remaking of Russia. True, Siberia, unlike European Russia, did not have communes, but because a law to extend private-property homesteading to Siberia (introduced on June 14, 1910) had failed to pass, Stolypin worried that his parallel program to spur peasant migration into open lands of Siberia would end up implanting the commune there.78 He further worried that the strong spirit of peasant egalitarianism he encountered in Siberia would counteract the individualistic yet authoritarian-monarchist values that he sought to inculcate.79 In the published report of his trip, Stolypin recommended that private property in land be secured in Siberia de jure, not merely de facto, and underscored how Siberia needed not just small-scale agriculture (which was flourishing) but “larger private landholdings.”80 By the time his report was published, however, Stolypin was dead—felled by an assassin in the Kiev Opera House.
Stalin did not make it out to the northwestern Altai near Slavgorod, where Stolypin had been cheered by thousands of peasants out in the open, and where in 1912 they had erected a stone obelisk in his memory.81 Stalin would not have seen that Stolypin monument anyway: in 1918, it had been destroyed during revolutionary peasant land seizures that reversed much of the Stolypin wave toward consolidated farms, and strengthened communes with their separated strips.82 But under the NEP, Stolypin’s yeomen had reappeared. The Soviet regime supported conversion into consolidated farms with multifield crop rotation for efficiency purposes, without supporting their conversion into de jure private property. But for the entire USSR’s land reorganization, there were a mere 11,500 surveyors and other technical personnel, reminiscent of the dearth that to an extent had held back the progress of Stolypin’s reforms.83 Still, consolidated, multifield farms accounted for under 2 percent of arable land in 1922, 15 percent by 1925, and around 25 percent by 1927.84 But even when consolidation took place, it was largely without mechanization and with a torrent of complaints that rich peasants who could afford to bribe local officials had tilted the work in their favor. Whether Stalin, out in Siberia, met with actual peasants, let alone large throngs of them, as did Stolypin, remains unclear.85 What is clear is that although Stalin despised Stolypin, he found himself facing Stolypin’s challenges—the village as the key to Russia’s destiny, peasants as a supposed political problem in opposition to the reigning regime. But Stalin was proposing to force through the diametrically opposite policy: annihilation of the individual yeoman farmer, in favor of collectively worked, collectively owned farms.
Scholarly arguments that “no plan” existed to collectivize Soviet Eurasia are utterly beside the point.86 No plan could have existed because actually attaining near complete collectivization was, at the time, unimaginable in practical terms. Collectivize one sixth of the earth? How? With what levers? Even the ultraleftist Trotsky, in a speech a few years back, had called a “transition to collective forms” of agriculture a matter of “one or two generations. In the near epoch we are forced to take account of the immense significance of petty peasant individual farming.”87 As of 1928, peasants were still not joining collective farms voluntarily. Whereas commercial and trade cooperatives encompassed some 55 percent of peasant households, production-oriented cooperatives were rare. Collective farms constituted no more than 1 percent of the total, enrolled on average only fifteen to sixteen peasant households, and each possessed just eight horses and eight to ten cows—economic dwarfs.88 At the same time, administratively, the regime had attained only a minimal presence in the countryside: outside the provincial capitals, traces of the red banners, slogans, and symbols of the new order vanished, and dedicated personnel were shockingly thin on the ground. The 1922 party census had reported that party members made up just 0.13 percent of villagers; by 1928, this percentage had doubled, but it was still just 0.25 percent of rural inhabitants, a mere 300,000 rural Communists out of 120 million people.89 Siberia counted only 1,331 party cells even in its 4,009 village soviets (and far from every village had a functioning soviet).90 Moreover, what constituted a “party cell” remained unclear: one Orthodox Church soviet in Western Siberia denounced the local party cell for its card playing and careerism; another rural party cell was found to be holding seances to communicate with the spirit of Karl Marx.91 Could these cadres, already overwhelmed trying to procure a minimum of the harvest, force 120 million rural inhabitants into collective farms?
Could Stalin even win approval at the top for a program of wholesale collectivization? He would have to outflank not just the pro-NEP opponents in the politburo—such as Bukharin, Tomsky, and Rykov—but even his own faction of loyalists, who remained uncertain of such a scheme. Stalin himself did not yet know how, or by whom, wholesale collectivization would be carried out. A “plan,” to do the impossible? At the same time, however, Stalin had concluded—as his speech in Novosibirsk demonstrated—that the impossible was a necessity. In his mind, the regime had become caught in something far worse than a price scissors: namely, a class-based vicious circle. The Bolsheviks desperately needed the peasants to produce good harvests, but the better the peasants did, the more they turned into class enemies, that is, kulaks. To put the matter another way, a non-collectivized countryside was politically unthreatening only if the peasants were poor, but if the peasants were poor they produced insufficient grain to feed the northern cities or the Red Army and to export. That is why, finally, scholars who dismiss Stalin’s Marxist motivations for collectivization are as wrong as those who either hype the absence of a “plan” or render collectivization “necessary.”92 Stalin had connected the ideological dots, reaching the full logic of a class-based outlook. Everything would be improvised, of course. But Stalin would not improvise the introduction of the rule of law and a constitutional order; he would not improvise granting the peasants freedom; he would not improvise restricting police power. He would improvise a program of building socialism: forcing into being large-scale collective farms, absent private property. We need to understand not only why Stalin did it, but how.
EXILING THE LEFT, ENACTING LEFTISM
Stalin’s January 15, 1928, departur
e had occurred almost simultaneously with Trotsky’s forced deportation from Moscow.93 Each had come to define himself via the other: two very differently capable disciples of Lenin, both from the imperial borderlands, but one self-consciously intellectual, with a degree from a university in Ukraine, the other largely an autodidact, with several years study at an Orthodox seminary in Georgia. Trotsky was living in the apartment of a supporter, Alexander Beloborodov, the Bolshevik who had signed the order to execute Nicholas II, but lately had been expelled from the party as an oppositionist (he was also suffering angina attacks). Initially, Stalin proposed exiling Trotsky to the southern city of Astrakhan, but Trotsky objected because of its humid climate, fearing its effects on his chronic malaria, and Stalin had altered the destination to Alma-Ata, a provincial settlement in arid southeastern Kazakhstan. By one account, Bukharin called Trotsky to inform him of the destination of his deportation.94 By other accounts, Trotsky was summoned to the OGPU, where a minor official read out a decree: internal exile, departure set for January 16, pickup at 10:00 p.m. Either way, he began to pack a lifetime of political activity, filling some twenty crates. “In all the corridors and passages,” wrote a German newspaper correspondent who managed to interview Trotsky on January 15, “were piles of books, and once again books—the nourishment of revolutionaries.”95 On January 16, the thickset Trotsky, his hair almost white, his complexion sickly, waited for the secret police with his wife, Natalya Sedova, and two sons, the elder of whom, Lev, planned to leave his wife and child in Moscow and accompany his father into exile as his “commissar” of communications and foreign affairs.96
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